By conventional measures, Donald Trump’s second presidency is already descending into disarray amid a legal morass, self-inflicted errors, and a vast gap between its massive ambition and its capacity to enact that vision.
Yet Trump’s tens of millions of supporters didn’t send a conventional president back to the White House – and don’t judge their hero’s performance by traditional yardsticks.
On one hand, exhausting crises on multiple fronts point to a potentially failed administration. But as Trump attempts to destroy governing structures at home and abroad, chaos is itself a marker of success.
So the question, as Trump transitions from the shock-and-awe euphoria start of his second term to grinding out his priorities, becomes what kind of event could cause these two competing realities to collide.
A recession that the president seems determined to talk the country into might puncture the bubble of achievement that the White House aggressively cultivates each day. High prices and job losses, after all, don’t discriminate between Republican and Democratic voters.
Or perhaps it would take a national security crisis precipitated by his volatile leadership and callow foreign policy team to destroy Trump’s presidency. Even then, Trump’s hold on his supporters is so strong, nothing might shake their confidence even if he alienates the middle-ground voters who helped reelect him. This, after all, is a president who convinced millions that the fair election he lost in 2020 was a stitch-up.
Still, if Trump somehow manages to secure a better deal for US manufacturers with his tariff wars, he might justify the mayhem he’s visited on financial markets. If “America first” really does convince Europe to defend itself and the president’s vows to forge peace work, the world may end up safer.
But hubris is threatening an administration that has made overreaches by previous presidents seem tame by comparison.
“You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority … Americans want you to be president,” Attorney General Pam Bondi gushed to Trump last week during a Cabinet meeting, suggesting the Trump team has misread its supposed mandate.
Trump’s victory, while clear, was not a landslide. Together with a tiny GOP majority in the House, it’s a thin political platform on which to base an attempt to simultaneously remake the global geopolitical system and the world trading paradigm; to transform the US government; and to destroy elite establishment centers of power.
Weeks ago, the Washington narrative was that Trump’s second-term team would be more disciplined and unified than his first. But that’s looking increasingly threadbare. The president badly needs some swift wins – not just those that reward his MAGA base – to sustain his credibility.
Chaos grows the longer Trump is in power
A sense of disorder is mounting.
— Backbiting and organizational chaos at the Pentagon came after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed fears about his fitness for the job by posting details of military strikes in Yemen on two Signal chats.
— Trump’s trade wars have wiped trillions off global stock markets and are likely soon to hike prices for inflation-weary US shoppers. His threats against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have shattered investor confidence. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is heading to its worst April since the Great Depression. And amazingly, the world is wondering whether the dollar is a haven anymore.
— His purge of first-term officials who knew how Washington worked is resulting in embarrassing accidents. An undocumented migrant from Maryland was deported by mistake to El Salvador, igniting a massive legal showdown. And the administration set off a feud with Harvard University, apparently by mistake.
— Trump’s claims that the force of his personality alone would end wars made him look foolish. His Ukraine peace effort looks amateur. Carnage is still raging in Gaza. He’s destroyed America’s closest diplomatic friendship, with Canada, with unhinged demands it become the 51st state. His bullying means many tourists are staying away, frightened by potential harassment at US borders. Allies are making alternative arrangements, thereby diminishing American power.
— There has been no blizzard of lawmaking to bolster Trump’s claims he’s had the most successful first 100 days in generations. How Republicans will pass his huge tax plan is unclear. And a future Democratic president could wipe out his multitudes of executive orders with a stroke of their own pen.
— Tax season at the Internal Revenue Service was marked by dysfunction, with a revolving door of acting commissioners at the key agency.
— Elon Musk’s evisceration of the US government may be setting up a series of disasters that are not yet evident. Massive funding cuts may gut US emergency preparedness as hurricane season approaches. Canceled health research on diseases like cancer may cause unnecessary deaths in years to come. The mistaken firing and hurried rehiring of technicians who look after nuclear weapons seems like an emblem of the Tesla chief’s tenure in Washington, which he said on Tuesday he’d soon begin to scale back.
— And Trump’s incessant demands for more power have pushed the United States to the brink of one of the worst constitutional crises in 250 years. The forest of legal challenges has also severely disrupted many of the administration’s top priorities, including its signature mass deportation program.
A different world
The White House, however, insists that such damning assessments do not recognize what it regards as a spectacular record of success.
And while Trump world’s creation of alternative facts has reached stunning new heights in his second term, there is some logic to their arguments.
The president has never made much pretense of governing for the entire country. His presidencies have been a long succession of attempts to gratify his political base.
That lens is the best way to understand his second term.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is the culmination of decades of conservative hopes to dismantle the mighty federal machine. This is not just an ideological goal, although hostility to government is one of the few common themes of two great GOP codes, Reaganism and Trumpism. Many Republican officials believe that the civil service has always been a liberal check on their presidents’ power. And if attempts to shatter that stranglehold don’t ultimately result in the full dismantling of what Trump first-term political guru Steve Bannon calls the administrative state, then paralyzing government might work almost as well. It’s going to be all but impossible for a future Democratic president to quickly rebuild what Musk has destroyed.
Trump’s belief in almost absolute presidential power horrifies his critics. But millions of Americans voted for this. He made no secret on the campaign trail of his intention to weaponize presidential power and the Justice Department to pursue his enemies. “It’s good to have a strong man at the head of a country,” Trump reflected during a campaign appearance in early 2024, in remarks that explain his domestic and foreign policies.
One of the most controversial aspects of that vision is playing out in the deportations of undocumented migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, including that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
But the White House loves the fight. It’s failed to prove Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a gang member. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stoked the fire again on Tuesday. “We were always right. The president was always on the right side of this issue to deport this illegal criminal from our community.” When Trump said last week that he’d like to deport US citizen criminals to El Salvador, he knew his audience. And on this immigration issue, he has some genuine results to show for his efforts. Border crossings are down significantly compared with the days of the Biden administration.
Trump’s tariff wars seem insane to Wall Street investors and middle-class Americans who’ve seen their 401(k) plans plummet. But the Trump administration is betting on a different audience – working Americans in rural areas and states devastated by globalization who helped elect him twice. “We shipped countless jobs overseas and, with them, our capacity to make things – from furniture, appliances, and even weapons of war,” Vice President JD Vance said in India on Tuesday. He added: “Many were proud of where they came from: their way of life, the kind of jobs they worked, and the kind of jobs their parents worked before them.”
Trump’s America first creed horrifies the foreign policy establishment and threatens to undo generations of US leadership. But those are the same experts who ran the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and are reviled by Trump’s base. America’s reputation abroad is being slammed by Trump’s dismantling of USAID, genuflection to Russian President Vladimir Putin and abandonment of Africa. But Trump and his supporters care little for allies. He’d rather be feared than liked.
A veteran of those early 21st-century wars, Hegseth now runs the Pentagon. His defenestration of senior uniformed officers who advocated diversity might be unfairly wrecking military careers and rocking the leadership of the world’s most lethal military. But the former Fox News anchor has the support of conservative media – one reason Trump is standing by him despite reports of his cavalier attitude to classified information. Leavitt hinted at the strategy behind Hegseth’s selection and retention on Tuesday, saying, “There’s a lot of people in this city who reject monumental change, and I think, frankly, that’s why we’ve seen a smear campaign against the secretary of defense since the moment that President Trump announced his nomination before the United States Senate.”
A similar distaste for the establishment also explains Trump’s showdown with Harvard. It might have been mistakenly started, but the clash is exactly the kind of issue the White House seeks – placing Trump on the side of the overwhelming majority of Americans who didn’t attend Ivy League colleges. If Democrats chose to defend these bastions of elitism, so much the better for Trump’s political cause.
History will form its own judgments on the second term of Trump. But as the daily pandemonium unfolds, it’s worth remembering that this divisive presidency can look like a dangerous failure to half the country while manifesting as a stunning success to the other half.
If America was ever united by a common version of reality, that’s no longer the case.
